The Heat (7 page)

Huge
pet flap. Was Wyatt a little guy or a big guy?

Trask returned to the main room and fired off a few more photographs, listening in on Leah as she massaged the millionaire's ego.

Then she was trilling goodbye, Mr Ormerod, thank you so much, Mr Ormerod, reverting to full snarling mode once she was in the Lexus with Trask: ‘You know the drill, I want good-sized prints of the better photos.'

‘Leah, he had a kid in there.'

‘Not our concern,' Leah said. ‘But if it's any consolation, he deserves to be robbed.'

8

After Ormerod, after Leah, Trask was relieved to go home, print off and deliver the photographs, and ride his Kawasaki to the gym.

Parked, dismounted, walked past a rank of Harleys and into the foyer, where he paused awhile, looking through the glass. The place was a heaving mass of desperate bodies toiling at exercise machines, punching bags, weights and aerobics classes, their grunts and groans at a counter-rhythm to the music, if you could call it music.

He shook his head and climbed the stairs to Cherub's office on the mezzanine level. Cherub, the Mongrels' sergeant-at-arms, was also part-owner of the place and kept business hours. His business being, apart from the gym, extortion, arson, armed robbery, brothel-keeping and human trafficking.

Trask knocked, went in, saying, ‘My man,' and reached out for fist-to-fist contact above Cherub's desk.

Cherub did respond, but only barely. Knows I used to be a cop, thought Trask. Hates me on principle. But Trask had no doubts that he was useful to Cherub. He supplied the Mongrels with crucial intelligence about police methods, put them in touch with other useful people, sold them information. He also bought steroids, teenage pussy and guns from them.

Cherub had switched his attention back to his desk work, eyes flickering from his laptop screen to a heap of receipts and invoices. ‘What do you want, Alan?' A busy man.

‘A gun,' Trask said.

That woke Cherub up. He leaned back in his ergonomic chair, looking the very antithesis of the other Mongrels, a slim, wiry guy with a soul patch on his chin and cropped hair. Tatts concealed. ‘What kind?'

‘Got a Glock?'

‘I do.'

‘Suppressor?'

‘It'll cost you.'

‘I'm good for it.'

‘You intend using the Glock?'

‘Do you need to know?' said Trask.

Cherub swivelled in his chair. ‘If all you're going to do is wave it around in someone's face, I'll buy it back from you. If you're going to fire the thing, chuck it in the river after. We clear?'

‘Crystal.'

‘Anything else?'

‘Yeah,' Trask said. ‘Can you get me a code reader for this?'

He showed Cherub a photograph of Ormerod's security keypad.

‘Yep,' Cherub said. He cocked his head at Trask. ‘Anything in it for me?'

‘No.'

‘Okay, then. Gun and suppressor, seven-fifty.'

‘Christ,' grumbled Trask, and shrugged.

Cherub told him to wait in the corridor. Trask cooled his heels for no more than a minute: when Cherub called him back in, a shoebox sat on the desk.

‘You got cash on you?'

‘Yes.'

Trask paid and Cherub looked at him. ‘Mate, I'm busy here.' He went back to his keyboard.

Trask didn't leave but shoved the shoebox into his gym bag, changed in the locker room downstairs and for an hour pumped iron, whacked a punching bag and paced himself on a treadmill. None of it made him feel any better. Cherub didn't respect him; Leah, Minto. He was just a hired hand. But if not for him, there wouldn't have been a client prepared to pay good money to get a painting back. No lawyer from New York, no investigative groundwork, no Wyatt…Barely any thanks, and shunted to the sidelines. And who was this Wyatt character? According to a police mate who still talked to Trask, no one knew much about the guy. Myths, rumours and shadows.

And now fucking Wurlitzer to deal with.

He showered, stepping out of the steam to catch a flash of himself in the mirrors. Liked what he saw: veiny, corded arms, wide shoulders, flat stomach, powerful thighs. He flexed some muscles, watching the tendons, sinews and bones move under the hard flesh.

Looking good. Then some random guy strolled into the change room so Trask covered up, wrapping and tucking his vast white towel. Busied himself at his locker, half an eye on the newcomer, a weedy guy with a long, comma-shaped birthmark under one ear. Looked like he needed a few decades of gym toning. All he did was sit there, on a bench, either taking off or putting on his shoes and taking a while to do it.

Checking out my arse, thought Trask. ‘Help you?'

‘I'm good,' the guy said.

Trask went home and late afternoon stowed a camping stool, food, beer, flask of coffee, iPod and a laptop loaded with movies into his main set of wheels, a Jeep, and drove to Sunshine Beach.

The trap was a huge house on a slope. Sea views and plenty of trees screened it from the neighbours and the riffraff who visited the beach. The kind of house that would look right to Gavin Wurlitzer, promising high-end electronics, jewellery, silverware, cash—maybe even a woman tucked up in her bed. All the sick fuck's Christmases coming at once. Leah had sold the house two weeks earlier but still had the keys and the RiverRun Realty
FOR SALE
sign was still in the front lawn. What mattered was the sign. Gavin Wurlitzer would take one look at that, and the size and seclusion of the house, and know he'd been fed solid information again.

Steering the Jeep into the garage at the side of the house, Trask got out, stretched the kinks in his back, locked the external door. Then he grabbed his stuff from the Jeep and let himself in, glumly aware that Wurlitzer wasn't likely to appear before midnight. After checking the rooms, cupboards, drawers, nooks and crannies, he settled in to wait, the Glock in his lap. Watched a couple of DVDs, sank a couple of beers, listened to music.

Bored, needing to stay awake, he poured his third beer down the sink and drank coffee. Tried to psych himself up.

Trask first met Wurlitzer not long after he first met Leah Quarrell. Leaving the police force under a cloud, Brisbane too uncomfortable for him, he'd headed to Noosa and part-time investigative work for a P.I. agency. Mainly shit work, then one day Leah had knocked on his door, saying, ‘You come recommended.'

Trask stared and waited.

She said, ‘There's a house at Noosa Heads I want to buy.'

‘So buy it.'

‘The owner doesn't want to sell,' Leah said, shoving a thousand bucks into Trask's shirt pocket.

Trask began a campaign of harassment: bricks through the recalcitrant owner's window, Facebook whispers, cocaine planted in the spare-tyre well of his Range Rover, followed by a tip-off to the cops.

The owner caved, Leah bought the house on behalf of a client. Then she called by to thank him. That might have been that except he'd looked twice at this slip of a woman, and she had looked twice at him. Back when Trask was a cop, love had meant a hand job in return for tearing up a red-light ticket. Fast, nasty, regrettable. This was different.

He started hanging out with Leah, and through her met David Minto, who kept him in work when the agency sacked him. Leah meanwhile needed help with her real-estate activities, and Trask found himself passing out auction brochures, hammering
FOR SALE
signs into front lawns, handbagging Leah whenever new male clients wanted to view an unoccupied house in a secluded location. ‘You're my big boy,' she'd say, coming in close and wrapping him in her little arms—when she wasn't shrieking at him for some misstep.

One day, early to a showing at Peregian Beach, they heard crashing sounds in the backyard. Trask raced around there and discovered a thin, hyped up forty-year-old man tangled in a tomato trellis along the laneway fence. Bleeding, jeans torn, whimpering in panic, he'd shielded his face, saying, ‘Don't hurt me.'

Then Leah appeared. She said, ‘Shoot the prick,' her eyes gleaming, wanting it.

The guy cringed further, trying to shrink into the ground. When nothing happened, he removed his arm from his face, recovered his composure. ‘My dog ran in here,'
he said, looking around the vast garden.

‘Shoot him, Al,' Leah said.

‘Don't be ridiculous,' the guy said, getting to his feet.

Leah poked Trask. ‘
Shoot him
.'

‘Like you've got a gun,' the guy said.

Trask reached under his shirt and pulled out his licensed .38.

‘Let me rephrase that,' the guy said.

Trask stared at him, Leah stared at him. Then Leah, a touch of humour in her voice, said, ‘Did you do any homework for this job, or did you just wander in off the street?'

Silence. The guy seemed to come to a decision. Finally he shrugged and said, ‘I always do my homework.'

‘Yeah? Prove it.'

‘I know you're the agent selling this place.'

‘You've been watching me?'

‘Yep.'

‘What else do you know about me?'

‘I know who your uncle is.'

That surprised them. Trask nearly shot the guy then. ‘Does he know who you are?'

‘Doubt it.'

Leah brooded on that. ‘When you're watching someone,' Leah said, ‘how do you do it?'

‘I use my car.'

‘Moron,' said Trask. ‘One day someone's going to think, strange car, guy sitting in it, better call the cops or write down the plate number.'

‘Hasn't happened yet.'

Leah looked the man up and down. ‘Are you good at what you do? I don't mean the preparation, which clearly you're crap at. Picking locks, getting through windows and up drainpipes?'

‘Best north of Brisbane.'

Trask eyed him, too, noting the slight build, the upper-body strength. He said, ‘You need better intel.'

And so they put Gavin Wurlitzer to work. Leah fed him the information, Trask monitored the police radio, and so far they'd made a hundred grand between them. Trask paid off his Kawasaki and his steroid debt, took Leah to expensive restaurants and had saved almost twenty grand.

And now it was time to pull the plug on the guy.

Trask drank his coffee and waited and thought. Leah liked to say Trask shouldn't think, thinking was bad for him. But sometimes he was pretty sure it was good for him, and right now he put some thought into Leah, her uncle, the painting and the New York lawyer. He'd liked Rafi Halperin, but then the client had flown to Australia and sent Rafi back to New York.

Finally it was midnight. Letting himself into the garage, Trask gloved up, removed a blue tarpaulin from the Jeep and left the house. He watched and listened briefly, then crossed the dewy grass to a dark corner beside the back fence, where the light was a tricky play of moon shadow, nearby street lamp and shapeless forms: the shed, a jacaranda tree, the fence itself.

At one o'clock he sensed rather than heard Wurlitzer arrive. Then he spotted the guy, a crouched shape darting down the side path from the driveway. Trask waited. He heard tearing sounds, Wurlitzer removing strips of sticky tape from a roll and pasting them over the glass above the back door handle. Before Wurlitzer could break the glass, Trask stepped from the shadows and shot him in the side of the head.

A faint pop and hiss and Wurlitzer dropped without a sound.

Trask went to work. He rolled Wurlitzer onto the tarp, hosed the blood from the door and the grass, knowing both areas would dry swiftly, loaded the body into the Jeep and drove to a tangled, untrodden corner of a wooded area near Eumundi. He buried Wurlitzer, drove back and put the tarp and his clothes through a laundromat in Tewantin.

Almost called in on Leah, tell her it all went okay, but she'd bite his head off, so he went home. On the way he dumped the tarp, the gloves and his clothing at several separate charity bins. Wurlitzer wouldn't be found any time soon.

When he was, the narrative would go something like this: a man like Wurlitzer, with convictions for burglary and sexual assault, had enemies who'd finally caught up with him.

9

Wyatt used his Sandford ID to stay in a Gold Coast motel, used it again to hire a Budget Mazda on Saturday morning, saying he'd need the car for two weeks. Dressed in a lightweight suit, shirt and tie, he headed north to Noosa, where he drove around to familiarise himself briefly before parking along a side street in Noosaville. He headed down to the river and then along Gympie Terrace until he spotted RiverRun Realty, in a block of shops opposite a stretch of lawn set with palm trees and outdoor exercise machines. Mad people toiling by in Lycra. The street on one side, mangroves, boat hire shacks and the river on the other.

He used a convenience store payphone to call Leah Quarrell. She named a cafe, but he said no, figuring that a man who walks into a real estate office draws less attention than a man who meets a woman in a cafe. People wondering about their relationship, whether one or both had something to hide. People wondering about him. He didn't want anyone thinking about him at all.

‘Your office,' he said.

She gave him directions and he strolled up and down the river for ten minutes, looking for unusual activity at RiverRun Realty, then walked in. A small waiting area, set with chairs, coffee table and magazines, a receptionist at a desk in the corner. Potted ferns and a young woman standing at the entrance to a short corridor at the rear.

She was mid- to late-twenties, small, slim, dressed in a sleeveless cotton top, a knee-length skirt and sandals with heels: an expensive look, which Wyatt put down to the work she did. Saturday would be one of her busiest days, showing clients around, attending auctions. Her blonde hair was pulled tightly back, her face was narrow, her teeth angled, reinforcing an impression of sharpness, tension and angularity, as if she lived on her nerves. Or she'd been stripped of flesh by exercise and dieting.